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The cat burglar gripped the outcropping with her thighs as she worked on the high window. She really had to lean on her knife to get through all the old caulk and grout. This old thing must not have been opened in the last 60 years or so.

As soon as she got through the nasty crust of junk, she got out her lock picks from a pouch on her belt and went to work on the lock. This part was easier. She knew all the tricks for opening old locks, and opening a lock forty feet above the sidewalk just made it more fun. Fifteen seconds of work got the lock open, and then she slowly pried open the window and slipped inside. The window was narrow and didn't open very far, but she was easily slender enough to make it through. She wouldn't have made a very good cat burglar otherwise.

She clung to the rafters and looked out over the massive storehouse, row after row of shelves as far as the eye could see. The place was much bigger than it looked from the outside. It didn't take up too much of the street, but it stretched back so far that she couldn't even see the back wall. From this height, she couldn't quite tell what sorts of things were on the shelves, but she would sure enjoy finding out.

She had been working this city nearly her entire life, but she had never even seen through the windows of this building before. She had no idea what was inside, and she had always been curious. Curiosity eventually turned to determination, and determination turned to obsession. The longer she wondered about it, the more she wanted it. She wanted to find out what was so important to warrant heavy steel doors, thick brick walls, and high, narrow windows.

Now that she was finally inside, she couldn't decide what to go for first. Everything just looked so tasty. She climbed along the rafter and gently lowered herself onto the top of a shelf, and she pried open the first crate she saw.

All she saw inside was a set of glass tumblers. She felt kind of cheated. Oh well. Maybe there was something better on a different shelf. She climbed down to the floor and started walking down the aisle, looking at all the shelves for anything that caught her eye. Most of the stuff just looked like furniture, stage props, and random bric-a-brac. The place was like a rummage sale.

She reached a crossroad and turned a corner, and she finally saw something that looked interesting. Underneath one of the shelves was a clothes rack with at least a dozen black body suits, one single piece from neck to toes. She rubbed the fabric between her fingers. It felt like nothing she had ever seen before. It was too supple to be leather, too slick to be latex, and too shiny to be spandex. She wondered what it felt like.

She took a furtive look up and down the aisles, and then she took off her belt, satchel, and climbing gloves. She followed it with her climbing shoes and socks, and finally her halter top, shorts, and underwear. She took one of the suits off the rack and looked for a zipper or something. There was a split down the back, but it didn't have a zipper. It must have magnets or something to hold it together. She slipped the suit on and closed the seal behind her. It fit perfectly, hugging every curve of her body without even a crease.

She ran her hands up and down her body. This suit was like wearing baby oil. She did a few pirouettes and stretches in the aisle, and it was amazing how easily the suit moved. It was giving her the perfect amount of support, but it felt otherwise like she wasn't wearing anything at all. The only thing the suit didn't do was keep her warm, though, and the building had a slight chill, so she put her clothes back on over the suit. The thing moved like a dream, it was incredibly comfortable, and it made her feel sexy as hell, but it didn't have any pockets or traction.

She kept going along the rows and rows of shelves, looking for absolutely anything that might be worth her while to grab. She saw plenty of interesting-looking things, but nothing that looked particularly valuable. There was a Magic 8-ball, an old clothes wringer, a megaphone, and a collection of various animal masks. Some of the things looked fairly old, like she might be able to get a couple hundred bucks for them from a collector, but she only had a satchel, not a moving van. She needed stuff that was small and valuable: gold, gems, cash, something normal like that. This stuff was nice, but she needed a score.

She eventually found a nice silver bracelet, just two strands of silver wound around each other with a simple clasp. It was probably worth a pretty penny. She put the bracelet around her wrist, since it seemed like a waste of cargo space to carry it around in her satchel, and sifted through the rest of the shelf looking for more like it. All she found were some more weird clothes, a big cabinet covered with tacky glitter and sequins, a large wicker basket, and an empty briefcase. She was starting to get frustrated at this point. This building was looking like nothing but a big tease.

At the end of the aisle, she found a doorway in the wall that led to a dark hallway. Along one side was a row of heavy steel doors with tiny, thick windows. Each door had a complex-looking electrical locking system. This was more like it.

She looked through the first window. Inside, she saw a room with a pedestal in the middle, surrounded by a yellow-and-black-striped line on the floor. Standing on the pedestal was an old-fashioned marionette. It might have had a face of some kind painted on it at one point, but the paint was long worn away, revealing the wood beneath. The marionette was being held erect by the strings from the crosspiece above it, but she couldn't see anything supporting the crosspiece. She shined her flashlight on the crosspiece, hoping to see some thin wire or fishing line, but there was nothing.

As she shined her light inside the room, the puppet's head turned to face her. She gasped and ducked away from the window. What the hell was going on around here?

She went to the next room and cautiously looked inside. This room had an old-fashioned coin-operated fortune-teller machine inside, surrounded by the same kind of border as the marionette. The machine featured a porcelain statue of a beautiful gypsy woman seated behind a crystal ball, which glowed and shimmered in constantly shifting colors. This one at least didn't seem to be watching her, but she still didn't want anything to do with it.

The next room looked a little more promising. The pedestal held a massive geode split in half, nearly three feet across and glittering with gems inside. She was about to open the door when she noticed the liquid inside the geode. It shone like mercury, and its surface undulated and rippled like there was something living in it. She quickly decided that the geode wasn't worth the risk of being poisoned or eaten.

She looked into the next room, and she saw a gyroscope, gently spinning and orbiting its stand with no signs of slowing down. Nothing about it looked creepy, dangerous, or valuable. It looked like any gyroscope you might find in a science museum gift shop. Without knowing why, she opened the door and stepped inside.

She slowly approached the pedestal, not even giving any thought to the line on the floor. She reached out and lifted the gyroscope's stand off the pedestal. She jerked the stand upward, tossing the gyroscope into the air and catching it in the palm of her other hand. She tilted her hand back and forth, letting the gyroscope dance from one fingertip to the other.

As she juggled the gyroscope around, it began to lift off of her hand and float freely in the air in front of her face. It hovered over her head and behind her, settling into a slow orbit around her body. She began to feel a gentle tingle of pleasure throughout her body as the gyroscope drifted around her in lazy circles. She didn't know what this thing was, but it seemed to like her.

After a minute or two, the gyroscope landed back on its stand and settled back down to spinning normally, as if the moment had passed. She reached out to try and make it happen again, when she heard a squeaking sound from outside. It sounded like someone was pushing a cart. She quickly left the room and closed the door behind her as quietly as she could, making her way out to the shelves where she could hide.

From her hiding place, she saw a janitor wheeling a cleaning cart down the aisle. He was dressed in a dark blue coverall, and he was stopping every ten or twenty feet or so to sweep. He looked largely unthreatening.

"I know you're there," he said. "I saw you go into the gyroscope room."

She hadn't noticed any surveillance cameras, but there were lots of dark, dusty corners high up near the ceiling. Besides, she'd just seen a living marionette and a floating gyroscope. She wasn't about to be put off her stride by a lack of cameras. She stepped out of her hiding place and approached the janitor. If this was the guy that went to deal with intruders, she didn't have anything to worry about.

"Hi there," she said. "Who are you? You don't look like a security guard."

"I'm the custodian," he said. "I've been waiting for you."

After all the spooky stuff she'd just seen, she was prepared to believe that there was more to this guy than met the eye, but he just looked like he was trying to seem mysterious, and he wasn't very good at it. "You've been waiting for me? Then you must know why I'm here."

"I can guess why you came, but I know why you're here."

The cryptic phrasing threw her a bit, but she rallied. "Look, cards on the table. I'm a burglar. I'm here looking for anything small and valuable that I can sell. I found a silver bracelet, so I know that you have more stuff like that. You're going to show me where the good stuff is, and then I'm going to leave. I don't have a gun or anything, but don't think I won't kick your ass if I have to."

He moved his cart to one side and moved a little closer. "You're not here for a robbery. Come on. You know perfectly well why you're here."

He reached a hand toward her face, and she grabbed his wrist. "What do you think you're doing?"

What happened next was so fast that she almost didn't see it, and she certainly didn't believe it. With his other hand, the custodian drew a sword from his cart and sliced her arm off at the shoulder. He then twisted it, dropped her arm, and swung the sword through her waist. He twisted it again and sliced upward, cutting off her other arm. He swung it around in a wide arc over her head and cut through both her thighs. Finally, he brought the sword up and sliced through her neck. As her body collapsed into bits on the floor, he reached out a hand and caught her head before it fell. The whole thing took less than five seconds, and at the end, he was holding her head in one outstretched hand and his sword in the other, and her arms, legs, butt, and torso were on the ground in a heap.

She was panicking now. "What the hell is going on?" she screamed. "Who the hell are you?"

He brought her head right up in front of his face. "I am the custodian, and you are about to learn the meaning of the phrase 'the good stuff.'"

He replaced his sword in its sheath, and he gently set down her head in a pile of clean rags on top of his cart. He then calmly picked up her various body parts and laid them in the big bag on the end on his cart, the one usually used for garbage, like he did this kind of thing every day. As he did, she realized that she still had feeling in the rest of her body.

What the hell was going on here?

He pushed the cart along the aisles, still stopping occasionally to clean something. The fact that he had a living disembodied head sitting in front of him didn't even seem to register. As they went along, she got a peek at some more of the shelves. Most of them were the same weirdly ordinary stuff as all the rest, but she did get a look at a glass case full of rings and a large ruby sitting on a velvet cushion. It didn't do her any good, though; the custodian had taken so many turns that she had no idea where they were.

After about half an hour of wandering, they came to an office door. The custodian turned around and backed through the door, pulling the cart behind him. From her vantage point on the cart, she had a pretty good view of the office. She had expected the desk with lamp and telephone, but there was also a bed and an enormous shelf of old leather-bound books. She watched him take the pillow from the bed and place it on the desk, and then he lifted her head off the cart and laid it on the pillow with a certain amount of care. He then pulled the chair away from the desk and sat in it, facing her.

"All right," he said. "You've got questions. Which one are you going to lead off with?"

"Am I going to be stuck like this forever?" she said.

"You mean separated? Probably not. Depends on you."

"What do you mean?"

"You've been exposed to this place now," he said. "You need to decide what you're going to do with that knowledge."

"What is this place?"

"This is a storehouse for magical objects."

"So that's a magical sword? Is that how you did that?"

"No, the sword's totally ordinary. I was able to separate you because you're still wearing the suit."

"Am I?" She had kind of forgotten about it. He got up from his chair and showed her one of her arms, but it looked bare. "It doesn't look like it. Does it vanish or something?"

"After a few minutes, the fabric melds with the wearer's skin so it's less noticeable, but it's clearly still there." He set her arm down and went back over to her head, running his fingers against the back of her neck. "You feel that?"

She could just barely feel the edge of the suit's collar. "Yeah, I can still feel it. How does it work?"

"The suit enables your body to be sliced, severed, or pierced without harming you. You can be stabbed, shot, or sliced to ribbons, and you'll be just fine. I could run you through a mincer and put you back together with no harm done."

So at least she could be put back together. That was a relief. "All right. Who are you?"

He sat down for a moment to compose his thoughts. "I'm just like you," he said. "I was drawn to this place. They were looking for a custodian, and I showed up for the interview, and as soon as I saw the building, I knew that whatever was inside, I wanted it. I wanted to be a part of it. It wasn't even a decision. It was just a fact. I belong here. And so do you."

"I do?" she said. "How do you know?"

"I was watching you. I saw how you reacted to the stuff in here. As soon as you saw that suit, you wanted to put it on. As soon as you saw the bracelet, you put it on."

"I only put on the bracelet because it looked valuable," she said.

"And the suit?"

"I thought it would make me look good."

He chuckled to himself. "Well, I can't fault you for that," he said. "What about the gyroscope?"

"I . . . I don't know. I just . . ."

"That gyroscope is the real reason you're here. It called to you. You saw how it reacted to you. It found something inside you that it liked, and now it's a part of you."

"What does that mean? How can it like me? Is it alive?"

"The things in those rooms are different from the rest of the stuff here," he said. "The things out on the shelves were created by pouring magic into ordinary objects. The things in the rooms are what we call wellsprings. They are where magic comes from. We draw magic from them to create other magical items. They aren't things with magic in them. They are magic."

"But why did that one 'like me?'" she said. "None of the other ones did. The other ones I saw just looked creepy."

"Each wellspring represents a different kind of magic," he said. "The marionette represents telekinesis, the ability to make other things move. The fortune teller represents prediction and soothsaying. The geode is transformation."

"What's the gyroscope?"

"Levitation. By touching the gyroscope and allowing it to connect with you, you gained the ability to float, walk on walls, or do pretty much anything else you want to move around. It probably liked you because of your skills at climbing and acrobatics. Actually, it's more likely the other way around."

"Cool," she said. "Which one were you?"

"What?"

"Well, you said you were called here like I was. If one of the wellsprings called to you, which one was it?"

"A telescope, one of the ones you didn't get you. It represents clairvoyance, the ability to sense things away from where you are. That's how I was able to watch you while you were out in the storehouse."

"Neat. So, how do I fly?"

"I can tell you how to do that, but first, you have a decision to make," said the custodian. "Do you want to stay here and be a part of the storehouse, or do you just want to ransack the place and scram?"

She stopped to think for a moment. She had been a thief for a long time, so her professional instincts were telling her to just find her way to that case of rings she'd seen, grab what she could, and run for it. On the other hand, everything the custodian had said about what had brought here was true. "What happens if I don't want to stay?"

"Well, I'd have to take back the suit and the bracelet, and I'd have to make sure you didn't tell anyone about this place, and I'd definitely have to turn you over to the police," he said. "But let's not fool around. We both know that you're going to stay. You don't turn away from something like this. You can't possibly have anything out there that's more amazing than what you've already seen, and believe me, you've only seen a fraction of what the storehouse has to offer. Besides, the gyroscope chose you. If you leave now, you'll regret it for the rest of your life."

He had her there. "All right. I'll stay."

He smiled. "Good. Let's get you back together, and then I'll give you the tour."

He got her torso out of the bag and set it on the desk, and then he lifted her head back on top of her shoulders where it belonged. He then got her hips out of the bag and set them on the bed, followed by her legs. Finally, he lifted her upper half and set it on top of her lower half, restoring her to working order.

She stood up from the bed and stretched. Lying in parts in that bag had been weird. "Ah, that feels good," she said, twisting back and forth to work the kinks out of her back. "So as long as I'm wearing this suit, I can't be harmed?"

"Not by blades, bullets, crushing, stretching, or anything else like that," he said. "You can still burn or drown, though."

She drew the sword from its scabbard and cut off her left hand. It landed on the floor and started scuttling around like a cheap Halloween decoration. "He-he, cool!" She picked it back up and put it back on her wrist. "Is there any reason why I'd need to take this suit off?"

"I don't think so," he said.

"Sweet," she said. "I think I'll keep it on, then. So, what does this bracelet do?"

"The bracelet is a duplication object. It allows you to make a copy of yourself using a big enough mirror."

"How does that work? Do you have a mirror like that?"

"Sure, right back here." He showed her to a back corner of the office, where there was a floor-length mirror hanging on the wall. "Put your hand on the mirror and close your eyes."

She put her hand against the mirror, and he put his over it. She closed her eyes, and the glass began to wear away against her skin.

"Are you feeling it?"

"Yeah, it feels like the mirror's melting," she said. Her voice had some kind of weird echo.

He twisted her hand slightly and pressed against her fingers. She curled her fingers inward against the mirror, and she could feel other fingers intertwining with hers. The other hand was warm and smooth.

The custodian took hold of both hands and slowly pulled her away from the mirror. She stepped back with him, but she felt like she was stepping forward at the same time.

"All right, open your eyes," said the custodian.

She did, and she found herself looking at herself. Not in the mirror, but in the flesh. She turned to look at the mirror, but she had no reflection. Neither did the person in front of her, who looked just like her.

"And there you are," said the custodian, stepping into view. She turned to face him, but he seemed to be in two places at once. She couldn't figure out which way to turn.

"It's going to be a little disorienting the first time," he said. "Your brain is trying to make sense of two different points of view at once. Take it slow."

She raised both of her left arms and stroked her right shoulders. She ran her left hands across the front of her chests and up her left arms until she was holding hands with herself. She looked up and made eye contact with herself, and she almost collapsed from dizziness.

"Okay, that enough for now," he said. "Let's get you back." He gently eased one of her back into the mirror. "Bilocating takes a lot of practice. You have to learn how to multitask and keep your two different perceptions separate. It's kind of like rubbing your stomach and patting your head. We can work on it later, though."

"What are you, my sensei?" she said.

"Well, I'm all you've got at the moment, sister."

"Aren't there other people in this organization who specialize in this sort of thing?"

He hesitated and looked away. "Not really. The guy who hired me left the next day. It's just been me for the last several years."

"You mean you've been cooped up in here by yourself, just sweeping up?"

"Magic has been slowly dying out for decades," said the custodian. "A hundred years ago, this place was buzzing. Magic was all the rage. It hasn't been really popular since Copperfield. People are less and less willing to welcome the inexplicable into their lives. When I was hired, the guy told me that he was the last of a dying generation, and I would be the first of the next one. I was supposed to wait for the other wellsprings to choose people, and maybe then we could try to bring magic back."

"Is that our job here?" she said.

"Pretty much. We keep everything safe, we make sure that nothing in here gets out of hand, and we wait for the other ten wellsprings to find their representatives."

"Oh." She looked a little forlorn.

"Do you still want to stay?"

She looked up at him. The first time he had asked her, he acted like he was ushering her into a mysterious secret society. Now, he looked anxious, like he was pleading with her. Even if she had wanted to leave, she couldn't have. It would break his heart.

"Of course I do. You still have to teach me to fly, remember?"

"Oh, right. This should be a little easier to get used to, at least. That's part of what made the gyroscope choose you. The ability to levitate is sort of attuned to you a little bit."

"So what do I have to do?"

"To start with, you have to change the way you think about gravity. Try imagining yourself falling toward the wall instead of the floor."

She took a deep breath and walked over to the wall. She gave it a good hard look and pictured herself pressed against it. She leaned spread-eagle against the wall and imagined that she was lying down on it. Suddenly, she felt an electric tingle that started in the soles of her feet and moved into her stomach, chest, and the palms of her hands. She pushed away from the wall with her hands and got to her feet, and she looked up at where the custodian was standing.

"Cool!" she said.

"Well done," he said. "Now try the ceiling."

She walked up to the ceiling and leaned back, putting one shoe on the ceiling and one on the wall. Again, the electrical feeling came, starting in one foot and moving to the other, and she stepped neatly from one surface to the other.

"Yes!" she said, dancing a little jig above the custodian's head. She then looked above her at the floor, concentrated, and did a back-flip, switching over in mid-air and landing with both feet on the floor.

"Not bad," said the custodian. "You're a fast learner."

"That was fun!" she said. "So how do I fly?"

"I think it's kind of the same thing, except that instead of focusing of a different surface, you stop focusing altogether. You have to stop thinking about gravity completely."

"Okay. Sounds simple enough." She closed her eyes and tried to forget about falling, but it was no use. "Actually, that's harder than it seems," she said. "It's kind of hard to forget about something I've been dealing with forever. It's like forgetting about breathing."

"Hmm," he said. "Wait, I've got an idea. It's a little extreme, though."

"What's extreme at this point?" she said. "Go for it."

He put a hand on each cheek and kissed her full on the mouth.

She pushed him away. "Whoa, hold on!" she said. "If you want to do something like that, you better ask for my permission first!"

"Sorry, sorry," he said, flustered.

"That's better," she said. She then wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back. He held her midriff and lifted her up to meet him, and they kissed.

When they pulled away, she was smiling. "Wow," she said. "You're pretty good at that."

"Thanks. You're pretty good at that."

"What do you mean?" she said. She looked down at her feet, which were still off the ground. The custodian wasn't holding onto her anymore, though.

"Now, don't let go of that feeling!" said the custodian. "Remember what this feels like, and keep it going!"

She looked around herself, feeling light as a feather. She closed her eyes and concentrated, and she rose toward the ceiling. She pointed her toes toward the floor and held out her arms and began to twirl in midair, the twirl turning into a tumble as she spun all around and upside down.

When she came to a stop and descended back to the floor, she was grinning from ear to ear. "That was incredible!" she said. "How did you do that?"

"You did that," he said. "All you needed to do was take your mind off of falling, and I've heard that when people are . . . doing that sort of thing, they're not thinking about anything else."

"Well, it certainly worked!" she said.

"Plus, I really wanted to do it," he said. "I mean, you seem like a really nice person, and I didn't think I'd get a better chance than that."

She smiled at him and gave him a peck on the cheek. "You're sweet," she said. "I think you might get another chance before too long." He blushed. "By the way, my name's Alicia."

"I'm Robby."

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Robby." They shook hands, and then she jumped into his arms. "So, what else can you show me?"